How I spent AutoItalia at Portofino...(LONG)

[Joe Garcia <lacorsanostra@domain.elided>]

Well, here's my story. I'm sure it has a very good
moral...somewhere.

I had originally planned to trailer my Maratona up,
for no reason other than I wanted to THOROUGHLY
"detail-wash," wax, smear leather goop on the seats,
reblack the black trim bits, clean chrome and glass
and use my shop vac to finish things off inside.

But then my client (he collects military vehicles and
he has a flatbed he was gonna lend me) but he
disappeared on Thursday. Grr. Still, "press on
regardless" is my motto so I email the Proper
Authorities and ask whether there will be a place,
after I drive 250 miles on Florida's Bug Infested
Turnpike, where I could wash, wax, smear leather goop
on the seats, clean chrome and glass and use my Li'l
Dirt Devil to finish things off with time for me to
change--all of this would leave me sweating harder
than OJ taking the stand--prior to the 10am start. The
answer was sent forth... "yes."

Well, OK. So I stay up all night (when I have VERY
early morning departures, I distrust alarm clocks...or
rather, my RESPONSE to alarms), seeing as how I have
to leave at 3:30 a.m. so I could wash, wax, smear
leather goop on the seats, clean chrome and glass and
use my Li'l Dirt Devil to finish things off with time
for me to change prior to the 10am start.

The drive up started well enough. To me it's always
eerie to drive in the wee wee hours. Everything is
lightlessly black and still, and through this goes my
Maratona, delicious exhaust note (I should set up a
#1-900 service for lonely sports car fans, $3.95/min.,
all major credit cards accepted) pointed to magnetic
north.

As it turns out, this drive will be the longest single
drive in the Maratona's young life. Handled it with
grace & aplomb. Maybe even aplomb and a half. Anyway,
midway up the drive I stop at a rest stop to change
driver fluids and adjust the belt, and when I return,
an informal gathering of young men, a respectful
distance away, is taking place. They speak of this
silvery jewel, its gorgeous lines being set off by the
rest stop's orange-ish lighting, with awe and
reverence and benign confusion. All of these young men
have their jeans at half mast...out of respect, it
seems. BTW, the space between the handbrake and the
console works PERFECTLY as a cuphulder if you only get
a small Coke. Which you should...too much soda
requires a very time consuming pit strategy.

I take the cockpit once again and roar off into the
dark distance. A mild fog rolls in, and it gives my
90mph cruise (not having cruise control, it takes a
while to find the position your right foot oughta rest
in for you to hold a steady speed of X mph) a surreal
quality...like if Fellini decided to film inside
during windtunnel testing. It seems a LOT faster.

As day breaks over the Florida wilderness, or what
passes for the Florida wilderness, the colors of the
sky begin to change and this signals I am very near my
ultimate destination. Sure enough, by 7:30 a.m. I am
at the Portofino. I drive slowly the faux (but
well-done) Italian seaside road, and eventually see
some people with VERY red polo shirts, a folding table
and assorted Italian cars. "Aha!" I said.

I drive up, lower my window to ask my questions when I
hear someone exclaim "GORGEOUS car!" Obviously an
entomologist envying the collection that adorns my car
from the bottom of the sump to top of the windshield.
I humbly say thanks and ask where I can go freshen up
and powder the Maratona's insectivorous nose.

"OK. Go to the parking garage. There are a bunch of
Ferrari guys, and the hotel has set up a hose." Score!
So I go into the parking garage, drive around. I see a
Ferrari here and a Alfa there, but little in the way
of enthusiasts, like bees in a hive, busily making
their chariots gleam with applied love.

"Hmm!"

So I go into the hotel and, logically enough, ask. The
valet guy sends me to talk to the front desk guy. The
front desk guy calls *every* extension. Now I know why
they call them extensions...because you can waste an
EXTENSIVE amount of time going through them in a
serious burst of futility. It seems NOBODY at this
hotel has any idea that their "piazza" is about to get
every square inch covered with (mostly) gorgeous
Italian cars, let alone who at the hotel is the
liaision for this, let alone know where the @#$%ing
hose is. Time, mind you, is NOT on my side, and so
passes me by rapidly and flippin' me off as it does.
7:30 has transformed into 8:15 and the protective
insect coating is quickly transforming into a durable,
long lasting finish.

Whupped, I return to my car to discover I have to PAY
for the privilege of not finding a hose. Fortunately,
the valet cashier took much pity on me and allowed me
to skate. Whew. But I am still no closer to washing my
car than when I was in the middle of nowhere going
through Florida's insect population like a leveling
wind. So I go back to the red polo shirt guys, who
look puzzled with a pinch of annoyed. "They SAID they
had set up a hose and eveything." A bit of mildly
bitter rumination followed. "Try the loading dock."

Ooooooooooooooooookay.

I try the loading dock, passing a pack of Panteras*
being preened by their owners. A LOT of them seemed to
be lemon yellow. Hmm. But I find no happiness at the
loading dock, just surly guys with ventilated smiles
and out-of-focus tattoos. Time is now flying so fast I
can feel myself wrinkling and graying. No hose.

"Screw THIS."** I said. I parked bit from the Pantera
guys, all happily gnawing on mastodon bones, or making
a sacrifice by the twilight or maybe just having
coffee and BSing...it was hard to tell. I open the
hatch and take out all the implements of cleanage. I
had the presence of mind to bring all the cleanage in
BUCKETS. OK, now we're getting somewhere. Sure, I'll
have to downsize my ambitious plan to wash, wax, smear
leather goop on the seats, clean chrome and glass and
use my Li'l Dirt Devil to finish things off with time
for me to change, but I'll be OK.

Now...where's there a spigot? Answer: Nowhere anywhere
near ME. The Pantera crowd seems to like their
comradeship dry. I am now staring at 9am in the face.
Things are devolving, rapidly.

I am trying to make sense of my relatively unfortunate
circumstances when along came a spider...in this case
driven by Marc (Mosko, our SoFla Maximum Leader)
coming out of the garage. He looks at me as if I am
trying to uncork champagne with three toothpicks, a
rubber band and a crowbar. We exchange pleasantries
and I tell him, not knowing any better, that I will be
at the exhibit area directly. He looks at me in
bemused pity and drives off smartly.

Anyway, out of desperation, I remember the men's room
and I take my buckets there. Only my 1 gal. bucket
will fit under the faucet. Great. So I EVENTUALLY get
these filled and slowly (hey, these WEIGH and they
spill too) make my way across the lobby to the parking
elevator, down, and then across the parking garage to
the Pantera Place. I lather up my car w. my fuzzy car
wash mitt. The front of the car needs TWO good passes,
but eventually gets in shape. I rinse...slowly. Then I
discover I need to refill the bucket AGAIN, because it
takes 11 gallons to rinse a GTV-6 and I had only 5 on
hand. So up I went like Jack 'n' Jill, once more into
the breach.

Once I had made the long round trip trek AGAIN, I had
at least a clean car. But now it's 9:55am and I am
soaked in dirty carwash water, sweat and insect DNA.
OK, now I REALLY have to hustle. I chamois the car dry
(Damn this is a gorgeous car), shake out the floor
mats and head back inside to change in the men's loo.

OK...I'm all changed and I take my washed, unwaxed,
unsmeared-with-leather goop on the seats, sorta
cleaned chrome and glass and un-Li'l Dirt Devil-ed car
to the show area. By now the Pantera guys have
disappeared all at once. (Leave no Pantera behind,
that seems to be the motto)

My GTV-6 is handed a goody bag, a Car Info sheet and
sent down the yellow brick road on my merry way. I
park in front of a very S4 Spider and catch up w.
Marc.

Throughout the show, Marc introduces me to lots of
people, most notably the estimable Fred DiMatteo, who
received a very nice and deserved honor. The venue is
great and it was cool to see the Meguair's guy
dropping free samples into all the open cars (HEY!!
You missed me!! And I *use* your stuff.) and also to
meet other Alfa movers & shakers, discussing
convention plans.***

Fast forward to 5pm. Marc gets his award, 3rd Place
Alfa (oh, sure, give it to a CLEAN car...) and we
decide to caravan down to SoFla. We exchange cell
phone numbers (Wherein I teach El Presidente a new
trick w. cell phones) and hit the FL turnpike,
searching for expensive gasoline. We stop at the first
stop and after Topless Spider Marc fixes his glasses
and flosses the first batch of bugs off his teeth, I
teach him how to work the tachymeter function of his
chronometer, since when we were cruising at ~80mph
Marc's speedometer was reading over 100.

And so we caravaned until our split-off point. And it
was only 90 minutes later that I got home, tired,
feeling gross from being in the FL sun for 7 hours but
having had a very good time. Except for the part where
I hit SOMETHING on the road that knocked some part of
my exhaust loose about 2 minutes after I last saw
Marc, and so I had a BOOMING exhaust for an hour and a
half.

Boy do I love driving this car.

-Joe in SoFla
1984 GTV-6 Maratona, ~16K mi., ~2M bugs

* Pantera drivers, it seems, like to go around in
packs, like wolves. I hereby state that it is well
nigh impossible to find a solitary Pantera...or at
least for very long. Somehow they sense loneliness and
have an internal GPS to help locate their solitary
bretheren in nanoseconds.

** Well, this is the closest that translators have
gotten.

*** July 3-6, in Ft. Lauderdale BE THERE. No excuses. 
Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site
http://webhosting.yahoo.com/
--
to be removed from alfa, see /bin/digest-subs.cgi
or email "unsubscribe alfa" to majordomo@domain.elided